The turbulent 2030s. Morden's continuous military assaults had left the world in disarray. The dictator "Devil Rebirth" Morden had plotted attacks against the Regular Army several times already, including attempts to steal their Metal Slug technology, and even partnered up with alien lifeforms on occasion. However, every attempt had been soundly quashed by the four agents of the Regular Army.

These failures had taken the wind out of the Rebel Army, leaving only a few small headquarters and handfuls of troops across the globe; Morden had lost his power and influence. Just as the Regular Army began to think Morden was done for, reports came through of Rebel Army outposts across the world, including one in a mountain village near Regular Army HQ.

Believing the news to be genuine, the Peregrine Falcons were dispatched to scout out the area. Marco and Tarma boarded their helicopter, holding out for it to be a false alarm, but Marco had his suspicions Morden was on the move again.

Unused materials

Despite having full English voice acting, the game never saw release outside of Japan and it is restricted to Japanese subtitles only. However, in the ALL.AFS file there are multiple versions of the "m_caption.PAK" file tagged with various letters: these are full translations of the game's cutscenes into English, French, German, Italian and Spanish! There are a few differences from the actors' delivery (including censoring "damn" to "nuts" with only one exception), as well as a few lines of dialogue that aren't even used in the final game!

A number of other files are tagged the same way, but they appear to be either encrypted or unedited from the Japanese version. There's even a file named "m_langselect.PAK"! I haven't found a way of accessing these in-game (trying to swap or replace files in the ALL.AFS archive will crash the game), but it seems like some effort was made into localising the game for international release before it was shot down.